The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

‘We may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation.’

I shall argue that there was a point in human pre-history when big-brained, cultural, learning people for the first time began to exchange things with each other, and that once they started doing so, culture suddenly became cumulative, and the great headlong experiment of human economic ‘progress’ began. Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution.

Today, a car emits less pollution traveling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

More than any other animal, human beings borrow against their future capabilities by depending on others in their early years. A big reason for this is that hunter-gatherers have always specialised in foods that need extraction and processing – roots that need to be dug and cooked, clams that need to be opened, nuts that need to be cracked, carcasses that need to be butchered – whereas chimpanzees eat things that simply need to be found and gathered, like fruit or termites.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

Where modern hunter-gatherers have been deprived of access to a large population of trading partners – in sparsely populated Australia, especially Tasmania, and on the Andaman islands, for example – their technological virtuosity was stunted and barely progressed beyond those of Neanderthals. There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.

The trust juice But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest? There was once a German philosophical conundrum known as Das Adam Smith Problem, which professed to find a contradiction between Adam Smith’s two books. In one he said that people were endowed with instinctive sympathy and goodness; in the other, that people were driven largely by self-interest.

Smith brilliantly confused the distinction between altruism and selfishness: if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?

The human smile, the glowing embodiment of Smith’s innate sentiment of sympathy, can reach right into the brain of another person and influence her thoughts.

Mercantilism said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor,

Perhaps Adam Smith was right, that in turning strangers into honorary friends, exchange can transmute base self-interest into general benevolence.

For instance, as evolutionary psychologists confirm, sometimes the motivation behind conspicuous displays of virtue by the very rich are far from pure.

When the market economy booms so does philanthropy. Ask Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

It is difficult to describe it as an innovation, although things like ‘cross-docking’ where goods go from suppliers’ trucks to distributor’s trucks without spending time in warehouses in between were indeed new.

Almost by definition, the more wealthy somebody is, the more things he acquires from specialists.